Firewall vs entry in Hosts file ????

[TenOC]

What is the difference (that is better) between having an entry in the "hosts" file, or a "rule" in a firewall application when trying to block inbound traffic from a known website or company.

[joebedford]

djsamuel wrote:
I had a stack of file cards with ones and zeros on them. I'd arrange them on the floor in a certain order and then have to act out the commands of the binary code. :B

Then you're a classic Turing Machine.

[djsamuel]

I had a stack of file cards with ones and zeros on them. I'd arrange them on the floor in a certain order and then have to act out the commands of the binary code. :B

[garry1p]

HMMM the first one I worked on built by Burroughs had lots of vacuum tubes with a drum memory.

Then there was the ADECS built by Kellogs for NASA only machine language and used I/O was a Flexowriter, Porter tape deck or paper tape. Was all transistor.

[agesilaus]

LOL we had a VAX, not sure which model. This was a power plant when it was being constructed the boss bought a VAX system and ordered software even tho he was 100% ignorant about computers. The software he bought was 'utility software', this was a Utility power plant, right?

Anyway he stuck it all in a warehouse where it sat for several years before the engineers found it and dragged it all over to the engineering office. They discovered it essentially had no software and had to type in BASIC by hand. Took a long time. They did finally get it to produce a text daily report but by that time the lab VIC 20 was more powerful.

In fact the very same manager used to bring visitors to the lab and point at the VIC 20 and tell them see that little thing it's more powerful than the big XXX hundred thousand dollar computer up in the plant office.

He never connected the dots, one computers do not age well sitting in warehouses. And two they don't do anything without software. He had no self awareness.

[joebedford]

OK - I'll play: PDP-8 with 4K 12 bit words was my third computer after IBM 360 and 1620. No operating systems on the PDP-8 or 1620.

[gkainz]

old duffers unite. I didn't say I "started" on the DEC VAX systems ... just mentioned I was there once.

I started with RSX on a PDP-11, talking to a Sperry/Rand and a Burroughs, writing assembler code for a Litton L-304.

The boot sequence on the Sperry was a bank of switches on the front panel where you toggled in the bootstrap loader routine... pages of ON OFF OFF ON ON OFF OFF enter ...

[agesilaus]

I could say I got started on my Altair 8080, flipping switches to program it. But that would be a lie...heh. I got my start on an Amdahl 360 mainframe and was there when they upgraded the Ram to 1 megabyte. Filled up the bottom floor of a building.

[RLS7201]

Y'all are a bunch of rookies.;)
I use to write in assembler on the 6502 Vic-20, 6502 1541 floppy drive (35 to 40 track upgrade) and the 6510 Crummy Door 64.
Cut my teeth on a Timex Sinclair 1000.

Richard

[agesilaus]

No I know it wasn't dBase, I kicked myself for buying the other brand. So I guess it wasn't Borland.

OK it's come back it was Borland Paradox, the windows version I believe. It used objectPal as the programming language.

[gkainz]

agesilaus wrote:
We had Windows 2 on a 286 PC with 386 KB of RAM for which we paid over a hundred bucks for the extra 128 KB. That is 41,450,777th as much RAM as in the system I'm typing this on. That was an upgrade from our Commode'd Or 64. Cutting edge at the time. I don't know if Window 1 was ever seen in the wild. We used Word not World for Windows which was not developed at the time. Lotus 123 and a db program from Borland I don't recall the name. I wrote software on their Turbo Pascal.

ah ... probably dBase III or IV? Ashton-Tate bought Vultan, renamed it to dBase. Then Borland bought Ashton-Tate and dBase III and then IV took off. I was working with Oracle back in the dark ages on DEC VMS and using CP/M, OS/2, PC-MOS, Windows 3.1 on the PC and MacOS on Macs.

We bought a 1 MB RAM expansion board for a Compaq 286 that was $1000 iirc - was a full height, full length board with both sides fully covered with memory chips.

Yeah, I used Turbo Pascal back in the day, too.

[agesilaus]

We had Windows 2 on a 286 PC with 386 KB of RAM for which we paid over a hundred bucks for the extra 128 KB. That is 41,450,777th as much RAM as in the system I'm typing this on. That was an upgrade from our Commode'd Or 64. Cutting edge at the time. I don't know if Window 1 was ever seen in the wild. We used Word not World for Windows which was not developed at the time. Lotus 123 and a db program from Borland I don't recall the name. I wrote software on their Turbo Pascal.

[fj12ryder]

I never had any workings with Windows before Windows 95. Never really had any interest in computers until I discovered you could play games on them.

[gkainz]

fj12ryder wrote:
Yeah, using the "hosts file" was an old trick from waaaaay back. I think it was of use with Windows 98.

Actually, the hosts file came into the Windows world via Windows NT 3.1 who's development was strongly influenced by ("ripped off from?" 🙂 ) DEC VMS, which was a parallel OS challenger to AT&T (Bell Labs) UNIX, which first introduced the etc/hosts file (HOSTS.TXT) that was part of the whole DNS system.

In the "learn something new every day" department, I've never heard of using the hosts file to deny or block routing ... I've only used it to define routing to an IP or host without depending on DNS ...

Greg

[Campfire_Time]

Do it at the firewall. In fact use OpenDNS for it's web filtering capabilities. It's free, easy, and has tons of built in categories to make blocking non-sense a lot easier.